Report: Nazis Planned to Rebuild Auschwitz

[Khephra]

BERLIN -- Nazi officials planned to move the Auschwitz gas chambers to a concentration camp in Austria as the Germans retreated westward from the Soviet army near the end of World War II, a magazine reported Sunday.

While SS chief Heinrich Himmler gave orders to raze the gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz in the fall of 1944 to erase evidence of the Nazis' crimes, new historical research shows that officials sent at least some of the equipment to the Mauthausen camp for reuse, the Der Spiegel weekly said.

Austrian historians Bertrand Perz and Florian Freund drew their conclusions in part from correspondence and accounts by survivors of both camps, the report said.

They also discovered a Feb. 10, 1945, letter to Mauthausen officials from J.A. Topf and Sons, an Erfurt, Germany-based company that made many of the incinerators for Nazi camps, that talked about sharply expanding the Austrian camp's gas chamber on the assumption that "all the parts from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp will be used again."

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-germany-auschwitz,0,772098.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

[Mr E McSquare]

1. Moving requires money!!!!

And where else to get it but Bush's grandpappy?

[slor]

2. Is anyone surprised?

The Nazi leadership was so committed to the destruction of the Jews, that they actually diverted trains needed to get arms to the soldiers on the front, for use to get more Jews to the death camps.

[madaboutharry]

3. Their obsession was also seen

in the extermination of Greek Jews in the final days of the war. It was a conclusion that the war was ending in defeat for the nazis, but they had to get these last deaths in before the last day.

[MrPrax]

4. Wonder what the photos how...

Eariler this year the British released thousands of aerial recon photos of Auschwitz...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1125188,00.html

Smoke over Auschwitz, landings in Normandy - unseen allied reconnaissance photos are revealed

For £10 you can view "as though in a time machine" a 3D photograph which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been publicised when it was taken at 11am on August 23 1944, at a time when Hungarian Jews were being murdered below.

The photograph, taken by an RAF reconnaissance pilot and released yesterday, reveals what Auschwitz concentration camp looked like in its climactic frenzy of killing, during which at least 437,000 Hungarian Jewish men, women and children were added to the death toll.
...
At the time the Nazi authorities, knowing their defeat in the second world war was in sight, had ordered a steep increase in the tempo of extermination. Crematoriums were overwhelmed and temporary burial pits were fired. Those due to be taken to the gas ovens had to queue for a day in woodland near one crematorium, so the ashes of earlier victims fell on them as they waited. The resolution of the possibly unique aerial image is so good that inmates can be seen on roll call."
----

The article didn't note whether there were large equipment transfers visible, but only that there was unmistakeable evidence of the Nazis working overtime which didn't seem to register with Allied Authority at the time.

[coalition_unwilling]

5. Read "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Goldhagen

to see just how determined the Nazis (and the German people) were to see the Final Solution through to completion.